"Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious."

Peter Ustinov Entertainment See all quotes by Peter Ustinov →

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“By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.”

“I am just a man, not fit to do the work of God... or the Devil.”

“Good-bye to you too ol' Rights of Man!”

“Sex is a conversation carried out by other means.”

“The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.”

“I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool, an optimist must know what a sad place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds this out anew every day.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The psychotherapist … tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world but not of the world."

— Alan Watts

Philosophy1915–1973

#humor

"Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. His landlady's cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o'clock…"

— Franz Kafka

Literature1894–1924

#humor

"As I was writing about Grace Marks, and about her interlude in the Asylum, I came to see her in context — the context of other people's opinions, both the popular images of madness and the scientific …"

— Margaret Atwood

Literature1939

#time

"We are being protected from hysteria. Isn't that what they call it? Maniacs! The world's been in a habitual state of crisis for fifty years. Fifty? What am I saying? It's been in a habitual state of c…"

— Walter M. Miller

Literature1923–1996

#love